Tess’s Giraffe

 

As is often the case, when I was leaving my house the other night I pulled around back so that my headlights could sweep the field to the south.  The reason was that I hoped to see some wildlife.

I wasn’t disappointed.

About 50 meters from the edge of the yard, a sleek, healthy doe stood looking back at me.  She turned slowly and started to walk away as my headlights scanned the open field.  Farther south, a couple more sets of eyes glittered in the shine of the car’s beams.

What were those deer doing in my field?

They were devouring our profit.

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The sight of the animals eating in my field reminded me of a news story I read recently.

A young lady identified as Tess Thompson Talley is being pilloried on the internet for posting photos of herself with a black giraffe she harvested on a safari in Africa in 2017.  On the original post, Ms. Thompson spoke of her hunt, “Prayers for my once in a lifetime dream hunt came true today!  Spotted this rare black giraffe bull and stalked him for quite awhile. I knew it was the one. He was over 18 years old, 4,000 (pounds) and was blessed to be able to get 2,000 (pounds) of meat from him.”

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Negative comments began to pour in after someone ran across her post and tweeted it.  Talley was cursed, shamed, and heavily criticized for her actions.  Some of the vilest comments seemed to center around the fact that she was hunting for enjoyment…that she got pleasure from killing the animal.

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It may be splitting hairs to say that, while they do enjoy a successful hunt, few, if any, of the hunters I know take pleasure in the actual killing of an animal.

Let me use myself as an example.  In the past two years, I have spent much more time hunting deer than in any other two years of my life.  Some would say I have had no success at all.  I did kill one deer during the season of 2017/18, but that was out of respect for the animal.

What?

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I spent some time just about every day I could sitting in the stand.  Most of that time was sitting quietly, listening to the sounds of nature.  I watched a squirrel one day as it made its way from branch to branch, back and forth, hauling food to store away for the winter.  Birds often flitted in the trees within feet of me.  Early one morning our resident bobcat walked so quietly up the gully I was hiding beside that I never heard a sound, even though the cat must have weighed 30 pounds.  Another time I videoed a pair of coyotes as they investigated the smells left by the young buck my son harvested on opening day.

Oh, there were deer, lots of deer.   There was only one day this past season that I did not see a deer.  Most days anywhere from six to more than 20 deer grazed, played, and courted in the field I was sitting beside.

One day, as I was making my way home I came across a young buck which had injured himself seriously.  My local agent for the Department of Conservation told me that deer running through the woods often impale themselves on broken branches.

The deer I found was basically a walking skeleton, just skin stretched tightly over bones.  He would not have made it through the winter, so I mercifully put him down.  I took no pleasure in his death, but instead felt very sorry for him.

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That buck was an exception to one of my firmest rules.  Every animal I harvest must be eaten and/or utilized to the best of my ability.  We eat the meat, tan the skin, keep the antlers, and feed everything else to our dogs.  No waste.  None.

Now, I may not have utilized the sick deer myself, but nature doesn’t waste anything.  As my long-time readers know, I put up a game camera on the dead deer and got pictures of many of the scavengers that ate him.  Crows, hawks, coyotes, opossums, raccoons, and even my own dogs cleaned the kill site up to where now, less than a year later, there is little or no sign of the buck left.

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But wait a minute.  When I was talking earlier about the healthy deer we kill, I said that we keep the antlers.  Does that make me a trophy hunter?  Some might say so.  After all, one of the reasons I haven’t shot a deer for the last two years is that I’d like to harvest a buck with antlers “stretching from here to here” and with multiple tines reaching so high he has trouble walking through the woods.  But, like other hunters, even if I wait a long time and finally harvest a big ole mossey-horns, the meat will be utilized rather than left lying where it falls.

Some critics say, if you hunt for food it’s fine, but hunting for a trophy is evil.  Does the fact that I do both make keeping the trophy OK?  Or does keeping the antlers make harvesting the meat evil?

Most trophy hunters eat the meat from animals they kill.  In fact, in every state I’m aware of it is a crime NOT to utilize any useable meat from most animals.  The flesh of large animals killed in Africa is usually distributed among hungry villagers or taken home by the hunter or guide.  You can see in Tess’s original post that she indicates she plans to consume the ton of meat she says she harvested from her giraffe.

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In many ways hunters actually benefit nature.  The money spent on licenses and tags goes directly toward managing animal populations.  By managing I mean keeping tabs on disease, game numbers versus carrying capacity, game/predator ratios, etc, to best maintain healthy wildlife populations.

Cash spent on guides, guns and ammunition, and other gear goes to working people while the taxes go into the government coffers.  Some taxes, like Pittman-Robertson taxes on guns and ammo, also go directly to help manage wildlife, as explained in the paragraph above.

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In addition, don’t forget that, even though hunters are killing animals, anyone who eats meat is just as responsible for animals dying.  Just because you don’t kill it yourself doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for its death.

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That leaves one possible legitimate argument for condemning Ms. Talley.  Some on the net have claimed that she killed an endangered species.  There are a couple reasons that this is a misleading argument.

One: a species can be endangered in one area and overpopulated in another.

A few years back I was looking into going bear hunting.  There are several hundred bears known to live in Missouri, mostly in the southern part of the state.  Because they are rare they are considered endangered in our state and it is illegal to hunt them.  However, in Arkansas, there are a lot more of them, and there is a hunting season when it is perfectly legal to harvest bears.

I talked to a wildlife biologist in Arkansas who told me about a farmer who would love to let me hunt on his land because bears were decimating his corn crop.  If I remember correctly, he said a 500 pound bear had already been killed on the property and there were several more in the 300 to 400 pound range.

There are parts of Arkansas where there are no bears at all and there are parts of Missouri where they are comparatively numerous.

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Argument number two: rare does not necessarily mean endangered.  Albino whitetail deer are rare in nature over the vast majority of their range.  Yet whitetails are more common in the United States today than they were over the same area when the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.  If you killed every albino deer in the U.S. this year, next year there would be more.  Why?  Albinism is a color variation, NOT a separate species.

From my research, I gather that the species of giraffe Tess killed is not endangered.  The population is healthy and even increasing over much of its range.

Don’t get me wrong, the black giraffe was pretty rare, but it was rare because it was very old.  That species of giraffe tends to get darker as it ages, eventually looking pretty black.  Her bull (male) was 18 years old, not to mention huge.  If the weight she ascribed to it is correct, it was about twice the average size of an adult.

In other words, the bull was very old and nearing the end of his life anyway, and had already passed on his genes to another generation of giraffes, many of which are already grown and passing on their genetics too.  Also, as old as the bull was, he was lucky to still be as healthy as he was.

Normally animals don’t live to be old in nature.  Raccoons in captivity can live to the ripe old age of 25.  In the wild, biologists say most are dead by the age of five.  Animals don’t live to retire and live in an old animals’ home, where they relax and play shuffleboard until they slip quietly away in their sleep.  No, animals generally die violently or, if they die quietly, it’s probably due to disease, which is still very unpleasant.

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Speaking of dying violently, there is something else that wasn’t mentioned in any of the news stories that spent so much time condemning the hunter.  The reason Ms. Talley was allowed to shoot the huge animal anyway was because of the damage the old bull was doing to the younger generation of his own species.  You see, this old bull that the majority of the media (and don’t forget all the Hollywood “experts) described as a beautiful, graceful, harmless animal just minding his business, had been verified by the government authorities responsible for keeping the species safe, as having killed at least three younger bulls.  Obviously, I can’t say with certainty what his reasons were, biologists say that he did it to eliminate competition for breeding rights.

If they verified that he killed three, it is possible that he killed others that couldn’t be verified.  If they were discovered after being fed on by predators, those animals may have gotten the blame.

Tess’s bull doesn’t seem so innocent now, does he?

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So it turns out that the one possible legitimate argument for condemning Ms. Talley is just as illegitimate as all the others.  She killed a legal prey animal while taking part in a legal hunting trip, and benefited people, and even the bull’s own species in the process.

I don’t have a problem with that.  Do you?

 

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